During the operation of tufting machines, a series of needles mounted along a reciprocating needle bar and carrying a series of yarns penetrate a backing material and are engaged by a series of hooks or loopers for forming cut and loop pile tufts of yarn in the backing material. Such engagement requires close precision in the positioning and operation of the needles and the hooks or loopers to ensure efficient and accurate operation of the tufting machine. During assembly of the tufting machines, therefore, it is important that the needles, loopers, hooks, and/or other gauge parts be accurately mounted along their respective needle and/or hook or looper bars to ensure that such gauge parts are accurately and consistently spaced and positioned along their needle and hook or looper bars. If the gauge parts are misaligned, the individual gauge elements can become broken or damaged, and tufts of yarns can be mis-sewn, resulting in inaccurate or irregular patterns being formed, which carpets have to be discarded.
Accordingly, it has been common practice to assemble gauge parts such as loopers or hooks in modules, including cast modules in which the loopers or hooks are cast or mounted in a solid block or module, typically including five to ten, or more, individual gauge elements, precisely spaced in a series. These modules then are mounted on a hook bar or needle bar to help ensure substantially consistent and accurate spacing of the gauge parts. One problem that arises, however, is that typically with such cast modules, especially where such modules are used in smaller gauge (i.e., 10 gauge or less) tufting machines, if a single hook or looper fails, (such as becoming broken or dull), the whole hook or looper module must be replaced. Such replacement of the modules is expensive and can result in removal and replacement of several undamaged or fully functional hooks or loopers within each of the modules, which leads to potential waste of other hooks/loopers in the module that are still operable. This becomes even more of a problem with level cut loop (LCL) tufting machines, which typically further include a series of gates or clips that are selectively actuatable so as to move into an extended or retracted positions. Each hook generally will have a corresponding clip or gate that either opens to allow the hook to capture to yarn to form a cut pile tuft, or closes to prevent yarn capture, and thus urge the yarn off of the hook so as to form a loop pile tuft.
Accordingly, it can be seen that a need exists for a replaceable hook or looper module that addresses the foregoing and other related and unrelated problems in the art.